Aiding Advisees in the Career Search
By Reanna Stoinoff
Advising students can be a challenging role each quarter, but as the school year draws to a close, students often raise more career-related questions and have concerns about their résumés as well as their academic schedules. Students may be seeking summer internships, and graduating seniors are looking in earnest for career advice and assistance in job searches. Though your advice as a professional in your field can be invaluable to students, the Office of Career Services has a variety of resources that can make your job as an adviser easier and more effective.
Students look to you as experts in their particular major, but also might ask questions that are more general or career-related. While you may not be equipped with the most up-to-date career statistics or have time to evaluate students’ specific personality traits and the best careers for them, you can guide them to resources that will meet these needs.
The Office of Career Services web site can help you increase your ability to effectively assist students, so familiarize yourself with our most widely used online tools. They are accessible at http://www.ohio.edu/careers/students/resources.cfm.
FOCUS is an online program designed to help students evaluate skills, preferences, values, and current areas of study. From these results, the program compiles a list of potential occupations and broader areas of work. It also allows users to get information about occupations such as forecasted job market, required education, salary ranges, and advantages and disadvantages. Users can do side-by-side comparisons of occupations and collect a list of potentials. Once students complete the FOCUS program, they can print their results and are encouraged to discuss these results with a counselor at Career Services.
VAULT Online Career Library is a new tool that has been added to the online resources through Career Services Online Career Library. Students, faculty, and staff of Ohio University can use it to receive free downloads of dozens of “VAULT Guides”—documents outlining statistics, descriptions and tips for careers according to industry, specific employers, as well as basic interviewing and résumé writing skills. The site boasts more than 20 Industry Career Guides, 53 specific Career Profiles, overviews of more than 2,500 company profiles, surveys completed by employees in a variety of occupations, and more.
These two tools are complementary to each other. A student can do self-testing at FOCUS, then search within VAULT’s databases for career guides, career profiles, as well as statistics and information about specific employers. Both FOCUS and VAULT require a password to access (and both are available for faculty and staff to use, as well.)
Another resource that graduating seniors especially will find useful is the NACE Salary Survey, a compilation of the most common jobs and the average starting salaries for each. Along with a great deal of other useful career resources, the NACE Salary Survey is accessible through the Career Resource Center at the Office of Career Services, 185 Lindley Hall.
